“What my father is trying and failing to say is that we’d appreciate it if you didn’t show up here all the time; our neighbors can be a little nosy,” said the woman I assumed was Aurelie’s mother. “They like the idea of getting us in trouble with our landlord.”
“Never going to happen,” said one of the other women. She slanted a glance in my direction and said conspiratorially, “The house is owned by a dragon princess. As long as we pay our rent on time and don’t burn it down, she doesn’t give a fuck how pleasant we are to live near. May the Great Rot bless and keep the greedy ones.”
The dragon princess was probably part of Brenna’s Nest; it’s rare to have two groups of dragons in the same metropolitan area, even when it’s as big as Los Angeles. I managed a wan smile, turning my attention back to the group spokesman. “You said we needed to talk about the theater. Please. What can you tell me?”
He took a deep breath. He looked older and wearier when he let it out again, like he’d used all his energy in getting us this far. “The Crier Theater was built over a warehouse complex that used to belong to us.”
“Not just us,” interjected Aurelie’s mother. “Us, and the bogeymen, and the hidebehinds. A whole bunch of the subterranean species. We all clubbed together to build the place.”
“Note how my daughter says ‘we’ when she didn’t exist at the time. Then again, neither did I. But my grandparents were a part of the group that put up the money, back when this land was more open, and it was easier to bury such things in the bowels of the permits department.” The old ghoul heaved a sigh. “I was born there. I grew up there. I saw my first communion there, and met my wife beneath the warehouse roof. It was glorious. We’d built a world right under the noses of the humans, and we never once saw the sun when we didn’t want to.”
There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask, some of which would probably lead us down very dark roads—like “What did you eat?” Ghouls are the only obligate carnivores we know of among the hominid species, and their meat of choice is usually human. They’d been content feasting on corpses until embalming and cremation became the norm. These days, they mostly go for live prey. A lot of disappearances can be traced back to the ghoul community. Since I didn’t want to get into a fight with these people while I was asking them for help, I held my tongue.
“We owned that land fair and square. Bought it in parcels and kept it in the family for as long as we could. We even paid our taxes reliably and on the regular, which is more than most of the humans around here could be bothered to do. But they got us anyway. Said we were an ‘eyesore,’ and started chasing loopholes.” The elder ghoul’s voice turned bitter. I still didn’t know his name. That was probably intentional. Humanize the child, because she was vulnerable, and they didn’t want her getting hurt. Hold themselves apart, hold themselves back, because they were adults and could damn well defend themselves.
I hated that we lived in a world where that sort of calculation was necessary, where we could search the sky for aliens and ignore the sapient species living in our neighborhoods and shopping in our stores. Even more, I hated the fact that I was helpless to change it.
“Let me guess,” I said, as gingerly as I could. “Estate taxes?”
The ghoul nodded. “They came at us with lawyers. Said we hadn’t filed the correct paperwork for inheritance, and we’d have to come up with money if we wanted to keep our place—a lot of money, because the land had become valuable while we were squatting on it and keeping to ourselves. Taxes got them through the door, and then they found a hundred code violations that needed to be fixed, a thousand upkeep flaws that needed to be resolved. We were smart enough to know they’d just keep coming, all those clever humans and their wicked lawyers, until they had what they wanted. So we sold while we could still make a little money. Enough to resettle ourselves, even if we’d never be as comfortable, or as much at home.”
“Couldn’t you move somewhere else and start over?” asked Malena. The ghoul turned to look at her. So did Dominic and I. She flushed, but shrugged and pressed on: “There’s lots of open land in New Mexico. You could build another warehouse, or buy an old airplane hangar, and try again. Hell, there are whole cities for sale, if you know where to look. Some of them even have liquor licenses.”
“I was born in Southern California,” said the ghoul. “My daughters went to school here, met their husbands here. My wife was consigned to the Great Rot here. I don’t want to go anywhere else.”
“Neither do I,” said Aurelie’s mother. She cast what could only be described as a fond look at her father, and said, “I’m a Valley girl. This is where I’m supposed to be. Aurie may feel differently when she gets older, when she gets tired of having humans in every direction. She’ll be the one who moves to a warehouse in the desert, not me. Although I guess I’ll follow her once there are grandkids.”